13 January 2015

The Mounties have a list of about 1200 aboriginal women who have been classed as homicide victims or missing persons. Prime Minister Stephen Harper has publicly given the matter a big shrug. At his house they're more concerned about homeless cats. So cartoonist Evan Munday has started a portrait-a-day drawing project in honour of the missing and mudered women. Above is Maggie Lea Burke who has not been seen since 2004. We live in a visual culture; artists can do a lot to move this issue to the forefront of public consciousness. You can follow Munday on twitter or visit his blog. (Via Sequential.)

A blog named Plenty of Nothing is admittedly not the ideal place for a post about missing persons, but it's better than silence. This issue is decidely not plenty of nothing, and is indeed more important than most things most Canadians talk about most of the time.

09 April 2014

Le Directeur Général des élections du Québec reminds everyone in its report on the April 7, 2014 election that the government of Québec still has its own ideas about the boundary with the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. Labrador Boundary Dispute. The area north of the dotted line, a chunk of the St Lawrence watershed about half the size of Nova Scotia, is seen folded into the electoral district of Duplessis (which was won by the PQ's Richard Lorraine by 359 votes.) In the Newfoundland legislature most of the area is part of the Lake Melville electoral district and is represented by Keith Russell of the Progressive Conservatives. For the sake of economy the Postmedia newspapers used this map in their election coverage, though editorially they would deride the land claim. But it was a strange election for newspapers.

25 March 2014

Cowdenbeath used to be a coalmining town, and was also one of the red hot centres of Marxist ideology in the UK. Lawrence Storione operated a Communist bookstore in Cowdenbeath around World War One, and had five children, named Annie, Germinal, Libertie, Autonomie and Anarchie. Source.

29 September 2013

Wind turbines -- so green and futuristic. I love the sight of them twirling away on the horizon. So much cleaner than coal or oil, and safer than nuclear power, or oil.

And yet!

Windbyte has an astonishing collection of photos of wind turbine failures. These things can topple over in the wind, throw a blade, or spectacularly burst into flame like the one above in Germany in 2008. D